In the following essay, Houghton examines the theme of illness as a manifestation of cultural difference in Daisy Miller.

Oscar Cargill's definition of James' "international novel" [in his introduction to James' Washington Square and Daisy Miller, 1965] indicates how close James came in so many of his novels to presenting the psycho-physical experience we now refer to as culture shock. "If Turgenev had originated 'the international novel,' James was to perfect and more sharply define it. An 'international novel' is not simply a story of people living abroad, as in Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, but it is a story of persons taken out of the familiar contexts of their own mores where their action is habitual and placed in an element, as in a biological experiment, where everything is unfamiliar...